Yearly Archive2017

No matter whether you are a sole trader, a larger building company there are good reasons to add sustainability practices to your business strategies – and easy ways to do it. Being environmentally friendly has become fashionable and for good reason. It not only saves you on costs, but it can give your business an edge over the competition if you offer people sustainable building advice.

Here are 5 easy ways to implement sustainability –

When ordering building supplies, if you don’t deal in bulk supplies take care to order only what is needed, in timber especially. If you do happen to run out you can save by profiting from other builders who order too much and end up dumping it in landfill or giving it to the recycling centre where they could make recycled furniture or save them time and the effort of on-selling it. There is a great deal of new timber that finds its way into landfill, which is a shocking waste of a resource that takes years to be ready for cutting.

Suggest your clients salvage such things as windows, doors, tiles and other materials from the recycling plant. They – and you – can save quite a bit doing this where you couldn’t really do it on their behalf unless they asked you to. They would need to choose the patterns and colours of the tiles, anyway.

Going green in your business is not only important to help save resources, it often means a savings in costs that you didn’t expect. Since both these things are positive, there is really no reason for not making at least some changes towards sustainability, whether you run a small SEO business or a coffee shop.

Here are 5 ways to go green in your business –

Saving on water usage is easy.

Install low-flow toilets

Fix dripping taps or leaking cisterns

Choose low-flow taps and shower heads.

If you have an outdoor area to maintain, use drought tolerant plants and mulch to prevent soil drying out. Install irrigation with a sensor so water is not wasted.

If you clean with a hose, use a high pressure washer because it will use less water

Waste reduction in the office

In the office kitchen use bulk supplies of condiments rather than single serves, which are way more expensive.

Encourage employees to bring refillable water bottles and their own coffee mugs, instead of using bottled water and plastic mugs.

Compost kitchen waste and offer it to local growers

Consider warm air hand dryers if you want to go paperless

Save documents digitally if possible.

Fuel consumption

If possible, leave the car at home and ride a bike to work

If that’s not possible, consider car-pooling or using public transport

Business owners need to look at locating their office close to bike tracks or public transport. They should also provide safe bike racks.

Nominate a day for employees to leave their car at home – with the chance to win a prize.

It is the trend these days to make your office green. Even if you work from home in web design or a similar type of work, if you have an office or work in the living room you’ll be inside a lot of the time, so it’s important that your work environment is green. Sustainability is about more than saving the earth’s resources or even making it a more pleasant place to be. It touches each one of us at a personal level.

If the environment is not clean and green, the air you breathe is not going to be healthy. If you don’t breathe healthy air, you won’t be healthy either. At the very least you’ll feel tired and lethargic much of the time. By making your office green, you’ll be doing a good thing for your own health as well as for the environment you live in.

Having a green office can be simple. Adding some greenery in the form of pot plants helps to add more oxygen to the air and so it is healthier for you. Having a growing plant or two to look at also has a positive effect on people. Studies have shown that people work more productively when there are plants around them. So if you want to become more productive, add a plant – or three.

Natural lighting is another positive element as far as going green is concerned. Being under fluorescent lighting or even LED lighting all day long is not good for us. It emits what is called blue light, which tends to interfere with sleep patterns. People who work from home late into the evening or who take work home with them to do at night are at risk of having poor sleep patterns.

Some people don’t consider timber fencing to be sustainable, but much depends on where the timber comes from. Many fencing contractors like Eline Fencing Perth use pine that is grown especially for such needs, so it could be said to be a sustainable source. However, pine is a softwood; it will need to be painted regularly to keep the water out so it doesn’t rot.

If you are intent of having a timber fence, there are other places to source the timber from apart from what the contractor offers. Here are a few examples.

Old railway sleepers – this is hardwood with still plenty of use in it and is ideal for fences. While hardwood is more difficult to hammer a nail into without drilling it first, it will certainly last for ages and using it saves the waste of it being burned as rubbish, just because it has been replaced by concrete sleepers.

Bridge decking – can be cut up into lengths suitable for a fence and will last for many more years when it doesn’t have to be strong enough to hold the weight of vehicles crossing it.

Piers – any kind of timber that has been used for piers or other used in water is the kind that will not break down easily.

If you opt for a roll on lawn, it can be installed almost any time of the year in Australia, unless you live in a really cold or wet area. Example – Tasmania. If you decide to spread a few seeds, then you would be well advised to do this when spring has sprung. Warmer soil temperatures certainly aid germination.

The ground preparation for both options are rather similar and a critical requirement. Obviously, planting grass seed is a long-term solution, and if you haven’t done your groundwork (pun intended), then the ominous march of weeds will soon begin and be competing for moisture and nutrients.

It can take months for a seeded lawn to become established and turn into a hard wearing, firm, and attractive grassed area. Roll on turf though, takes just a few weeks to become established. It is capable of withstanding kids playing on it within 2-3 weeks, and certainly after a month, you can set up the stumps for a game of cricket. The big advantage and a preference for many people selecting to use roll on turf is that it has the finished look after Day 1. Both options have the same aftercare from installation – keep off it and keep it moist.

Here are a few tips on ground preparation:

It might be an idea to spray the old grass with a strong weedkiller before you start. Remove the old lawn. Use a flat spade, but if you have a large area then hiring a turf cutter is the best solution.

Clothing for the wedding is always going to be a high ticket item, but there are ways to reduce the expense and this in turn, will help to reduce the carbon footprint of your wedding. According to Kiss and Tell Photo Booths there are many other ways to do this too, from photo booth hire to save on the use of chemicals in printing out photos – and in a good choice of food that is organic. But how can you make the wedding clothes eco friendly? Here are several ways.

Chose a pre-worn wedding dress. You can find these on special websites or even in an op-shop. It could be your mum’s or another relative’s wedding dress and/or veil that is available to you. While it may not feel right wearing someone else’s dream bridal finery, if you choose one that is from several years or decades back, it is a pretty good bet that no one will remember it. And vintage is always cool.

Choose a dress that can be worn again. Whether it is in the style that can be easily adapted to look like a party dress instead of a wedding dress, or whether it is in the colour, choosing a wedding dress that can be worn several more times will certainly help to save the earth’s resources as well as your own.

Allow the bridesmaids to wear a dress they already have. This is an excellent choice for the less formal wedding and can be a big save. You can bring the ensembles together by having them choose styles or colours that are similar or by adding accessories that all match or even just in the length.

With billions of kilos in computer waste being generated every year it is a good idea to ensure your computer usage at least, is eco friendly. If you use your computer a lot you might be into web design or digital marketing, but even if you just use it at home and not for a business, the computer has a high rate of energy consumption. Using it in eco friendly ways is not just good for the earth’s resources, but good for your budget as well.

Here are some tips on how to save power with your computer.

Make sure your monitor’s sleep feature is set to power down automatically when you are away from it for a while. Look for ‘Power Options’ in your control panel. While sleep mode still uses some energy it can also save a great deal

Make sure you turn your monitor off each night and when you are going to be away all day, or for a few hours. This will save a great deal on power usage

Lower the display brightness. The brighter your monitor is, the more power is being used. Another advantage is that a dimmer light reduces eye strain

If you have an animated screen saver, turn it off. These were to protect the old monitors. Newer LCD or LED monitors don’t need this type of protection and animated screensavers take up a lot of power, even if they are fun to watch.

These days with the constant use of air conditioning and heating, we may want to make sure we use the air con in a way that is eco friendly. This not only helps to save our precious resources; it also saves on running costs and will preserve the life of your air conditioning unit. Most people consider keeping the filters clean to be sufficient, but there is much more you can do to help the planet that requires little effort.

If you are getting a split system, make sure it’s an inverter. These have variable speed so rather than switching the compressor on and off all the time, they simply reduce its speed automatically to match demand. This results in less power use and less wear the tear on the compressor.

Before purchasing an air con, make sure it is the right size for your needs. If you get one that’s too big for the area to be cooled it will be constantly turning on and off, which costs more to run. If it is too small, you won’t be as cool and the unit will always be working harder to cool the area. This will make it wear out much more quickly.

A licensed electrician and authorised air conditioner installer will know how to estimate your heat load and tell you what size unit would be best.

Look at the energy rating labels on the air con before you choose what to get. The blue band is for cool air and the red band is for heat. In some cases, there is another short band above the bottom one that also contains stars. If they are solid in this area it means that air con is super efficient. 7 to 10 stars is good for efficiency and so sustainability.

These days, with just a little bit of effort, everything we do can be eco friendly to some extent, whether it is at home, or at a home or work office. You may have set up business as a digital marketing agency such as Slinky Digital and work on your computer all day long. If everyone does something to reduce their carbon footprint, the result will be incredible and our precious resources will last a lot longer.

If you have a computer, you will most likely also have a printer. Not all printers are efficient, but laser printers can be said to be better than inkjet printers because the ink will not smudge if it gets wet. So when you print out a sheet, you won’t have to reprint it due to any smudges, thus saving ink. And you can usually print more with one toner cartridge than one container of ink.

Another way to ensure your printer is eco friendly is to purchase one that spits out those pages quickly. All printers use power while they are printing; if a printer takes 30 or even 10 seconds to print one page of type, it will take a lot longer and so use more power than one that can print a page in 1 or 2 seconds. So it’s important to look at the specifications of a printer before you purchase it.

So look at the pages per minute the printer will do, but also look at what other features it has that you may need. Having a printer that can hold 250 pages is a lot more convenient than one which can only hold 10 pages.